First, however, allow me to set the stage. We are sometime in early Spring of 367 AD. Hostilities and tensions with Persia have been rumbling on for a few years but no actual conflict has broken out as yet. The Emperor Flavius Julius Valens has moved a sizable portion of the army of the Oriens out of the interior cities and towns and is re-grouping them in various detachments along the limes – the frontier zone that marks the border between Rome and Persia. Meanwhile, he himself has marched north across the Bosphorus and into Thrace to penetrate the Danube frontier. It is an excursus designed crush the Goths in retaliation for their support of a now-dead usurper. Whether war with Persia will break out in the absence of the emperor or not remains a heated topic of debate in the local tavernae and agoras of all the towns in the Diocese of the Oriens - from Antioch itself to Edessa, Damascus, Amida and even up to Melitene and the nameless hill settlements strung out about that remote town. However, the papyri fragments recovered in Melitene itself remain dry and interested only in assessing provisions, detailing guard patrols and notating those soldiers who were fit for duty and those who were on assignment out with the town itself. Details typical of any army in any period and which would not be out of place in the regimental headquarters of a field camp among the trenches in Flanders or the silk pavilions of Harfleur or even in the prefabs of Kandahar in Afghanistan.
This is the daily world of the Twelfth Fulminata Legion, a garrison and frontier legion, now under the regional command of Brachius, the Dux Armenia, a stolid and career-orientated Illyrian from Sirmium; a man the philosopher Libanius once referred to as ‘that dry aqueduct of a conversationalist.’ The Duodecima Fulminata Legio – to give it its full title – is no longer, as can been seen from the papyri, a crack legion and is clearly operating now more as a border police force: gathering taxes, hunting down inept bandits, and generally patrolling the ill-defined limes. What makes all this interesting however is not the mundane and somewhat regurgitated litany of details in the papyri of the Twelfth ‘Thundering’ Legion but the surprising fact that the hand-writing in all these reports is clearly by the same hand which wrote the graffito on the pottery shard about our Corbulo. It was an observation which not only propelled me on my first steps into this period but also earned Combes a bottle of single malt whiskey in gratitude as a result:
‘. . . First Cohort and Second Cohort remain under-strength and in need of essential provisions in this the Consulship of Lupicinus and Jovinus, the third year since our Sacred Dominus assumed the Purple. Eighteen milites remain missing from the lists. Twenty three milites are under the care of the medicus. Four died of the flux a week ago. Fifteen milites are on authorised furlough to Antioch – may God and His Son bless them – and we still have no Praefectus to make the benedictions and raise the prayers for the divine goodwill of our new Imperator. The curiales of Melitene resist as ever their requisite hospitality and have lodged several claims for property damage and theft. The Third Cohort remains detached to the frontier fort at Auaxa to the south under the command of the Praepositus Cyrion. Scouting detachments of the latter report sporadic hill brigandage of the usual sort. The grain horrae are plagued with rats, may the Forty curse them all . . .’
What do we learn from this fragment alone? As ever the local population resents the billeting of the legion within its area despite the protection such a force will provide; it consists of three remaining cohorts out of an original ten which gives the Twelfth an effective strength of some two thousand legionaries or so, given that the First Cohort has always traditionally been a double-strength one; and the Twelfth is without a commanding officer or Praefectus and has been for some time - a highly unusual position and one we will come back to in more detail later. Another fragment is worth quoting:
‘. . . The Nones of Aprilis passed with ferocious storms and the Melas river broke its bank to flood the main forum of Melitene. The men of the Legion assisted with repairs and celebrated with prayers and offerings to Christ and the Forty. The curiales of the town presented watered down wine. Violence ensued. Two legionaries and one centurion, Remus, ever Remus, were placed under the care of the medicus. Nine men of Melitene suffered broken limbs. In punishment, all centuries involved were ordered on a ten day march into the Analaean hills north of the town and suffered the flies and thirst of Roman disciplina . . . The Bishop of Melitene was banished together with his pregnant servant and not just for his heretical Nicene faith. The statues of the gods from the temple of Aphrodite were finally broken up and their marble sold off to the Syrian traders. The latter gifted the Twelfth four amphorae of Alexandrian wine, of the unwatered sort . . .’
Religious tensions, civilian against soldier, the drudgery of manual labour, sporadic violence, celebrations – in other words, typical life in a frontier town on the edge of Empire . . .
Melitene, or modern day Malatya in south-east Turkey, is an ancient town in the Cappadocian hinterland of the foothills of the Taurus mountains. It has an illustrious history having seen Scythian, Cimmerian, Hittite and Akkadian invaders wash over it in previous epochs. A tributary of the Euphrates, the Melas river, washes past the old town. A few Roman miles east lies the Euphrates itself as it tumbles down from the Taurus mountains and seeps into the great fertile lands of Mesopotamia to the south. Beyond that mighty river lie the ancient peoples of Armenia and Persia all mixed together in an oriental stain of history and conflict. Further east amid jumbled hills and knotty peaks lies the upper Tigris, that second great river of the Fertile Crescent. Melitene while old and venerable is now a canton town of the province of Armenia Minor and part of the frontier limes of Cappadocia. All along the crowded banks of the upper Euphrates, small garrison forts and river-posts can be found, with the Twelfth stationed here further back. North at Satala can be found the old legionary camp of the Fifteenth Apollinaris Legion, built back in the days of Trajan, while up on the shores of the Black Sea at Trebizond musters the final legion under the command of the Dux Armenia, the First Pontic Legion. In between these three border legions lies a scattering of cavalry regiments and the old auxiliary cohorts. Together, these make up the command of Brachius, that pedant of a soldier, to paraphrase Libanius, who is tasked with patrolling and defending the edge of the Empire here along the Euphrates as it tumbles down from the northern Taurus mountains into the rolling fertile plains further south and east.
The town itself, crowded about with low dusky hills all fringed with apricot groves, olive trees and wild rose, remains a typical town under the Empire in the east in these troubled regions: it is a redoubt of Roman, Greek and Syrian culture surrounded in a hinterland of rough Cordueni hillmen and pastoralists. There are only a few outlying villae cast in the Senatorial mould. Small settlements cling precariously to the lower slopes of the Taurus, dependant on fragile crops and roaming herds of goats and sheep. Higher in the mountains, drift deserters, bandits, Christian mystics and the remnants of pagans - the latter now all but banished from the lower plains and valleys. War and invasion has not spared Cappadocia in the past but the town itself remains largely intact and free from devastation. Its people are a hardy mix of Cordueni natives and those Greek and Syrian families whose blood now is so intermingled that a sort of patois or argot is spoken in which Greek and Aramaic mix and flow like badly diluted wine. On a low hill to the north of the town itself sits the old legionary camp of the Twelfth - now run-down and dilapidated. Ongoing excavations under a combined Polish/Turkish team have shown that in the Third and Fourth centuries, the original fort was reduced in size and re-configured from the classic playing-card shape into an uneven trapezoid which hugged the contours of the low hill and so provided better defence. Gateways are filled in, the ditch is widened, and protruding bastion towers able to support artillery are added. It has been estimated that a garrison of some two thousand soldiers was now quartered in the fort and this is borne out by the papyri records of a legion reduced now to three cohorts. We may conjecture that in the chaos of the Third Century, cohorts from the Twelfth were detached and marched away in various vexillations, never to return, and the legion remained in its rump state as a consequence.
Life drifts on for the Twelfth and the papyri fragments detail a world which has changed little in over three hundred years as the following extracts show:
‘ . . . Ammidas, Optio, is granted ten days’ furlough. He has three days’ furlough also to return . . .
. . . The Centurion, Pamphilius the Bull, of the broad shoulders, Second Cohort, returned from the Dux at Sebestae with tiros, thirty in number, all empty wineskins of men . . .
. . . The latrunculus, Mammertus, together with eleven of his robbers, was caught at the Trident Crossing and apprehended. Two milites were slain and four wounded. Appropriate deductions to be made from the funeral fund . . .’
This hand, so methodical and persistent, and which at some point, far away in Antioch, had made that mocking remark about Corbulo, remains curiously detached from those figures about him - there are slighting remarks, for example, about a Centurion named Remus; Pamphilius is nicknamed for his broad shoulders; other fragments refer dismissively to the curiales, or town councillors, and also the townsfolk. On the whole, it seems, this is a hand which while meticulous is also bored and it does not take a genius to realise that in the daily monotony of life in a border legion, writing up such reports must have been dull in the extreme. A longer extract will illustrate this better than my words can:
‘. . .The patrol returned late and under the command of a centurion clearly drunk. I refrain from naming him. In his wake filed a century of worn and sullen milites, all glowering at his back. Whether from resentment or jealousy, it was hard to tell. His report as dictated to me was confused and contradictory and left me with the distinct impression that the ten day march up and down the Melas river as ordered by the Primus Pilus Strabonius only covered a few days and the rest were spent idling about along the riverbank out of sight. I put it to him that he was in dereliction of his duty and he laughed openly in my face before spitting onto the papyrus and walking out. When I mentioned this later to Strabonius, he shrugged and told me to report it to the Praefectus. That has become a refrain now - any infraction or lapse from duty is coded with the phrase ‘report it to the Praefectus’. In other words, shut up. And so I shrug too and write the reports and put them away for no-one to read. There is a joke here among the veterani: a dog with no master has an easy life . . .’
It is an irony, of course, that this hand which has left us so much detail and event in these fragmentary papyri remains anonymous. It is possible to glean a little of his personality and his background (which I will leave for the reader to appreciate as it emerges in the extracts) but on the whole we know nothing about his name, his previous postings, or his intimate background. We may conjecture that he is educated for he writes in Latin and knows both Greek and that Aramaic/Syrian tongue prevalent in these regions. He is ambivalent about the Christian dogma being fought over in these intense times and also remains aloof from the old pagan traditions. There is a nagging sense in him that he has missed something or that something has passed him by - and that now he is idling in a faintly dismissive manner in a life which gives him no joy. Or is it that our reading of these dry Latin reports misconstrues his words? It will perhaps be impossible to know for certain. What is certain however is that this man - an Adjutor, or senior notary, in the Twelfth who lacks a battlefield commission - pens and reports and observes as if he himself is never involved in it all.
For our scribe and legionary, however, this is soon to change.
The Janus Eagle
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Originally Posted by Diocle
We are onboard now, be ready, it's a very dangerous travel and you can no longer get out of the car when the trip is started, but It's always worth it!!! 
....He....He....now pops up also there!?!?!?.....But...I've finished the story......it was perfect like a Swiss Chronograph!...
....And now?.......OK!..One touch of a bit more uncertainty..
..some shadows here and there....but please Clarissimus, stop the travels of Great Man.....This Imperial Ubiquity is extremely dangerous for my mental health!!!!
